Chapter 5
Bridging the Rural–Urban
Divide: What Can the Urban
Learn from the Rural? Reflections
on the Case of Mexico
Gareth A. Jones
INTRODUCTION1
One of the most enduring organizational devices in development studies is the division of society into rural and urban. Indeed, the association of urbanization with particular notions of modernity has been a ‘normal’ part of the development discourse so that, to many people, the urban is a synonym for development itself and ‘anti-poverty measures’ are shorthand for rural programmes – note the few references to the urban in the 2000/2001 World Development report ‘Attacking Poverty’ (World Bank, 2001). Moreover, despite the so-called ‘new’ thinking on so many ‘new’ agendas, the validity of rural and urban as organizational categories has mostly escaped attention. An enormous machinery of government agencies, donor organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), academics and consultants gather and analyse statistics that are assigned to one category or the other. Despite rhetoric of holistic programmes, horizontal coordination and joined-up government, the development lexicon remains full of signifiers to spatial exclusivity: ‘urban’ governance, urban management, urban indicators, urban poverty, sustainable cities. Generally, there is little awareness that local people's representations of the rural–urban divide may not be separated along the same imaginary lines or that people in rural areas might be urban stakeholders too (James, 2001). Only very gradually has some dissatisfaction with rural and urban elements as stable categories appeared, and concepts such as ‘rural–urban interface’ and ‘peri-urban’ have emerged to challenge stereotypes (Rigg, 1998; Tacoli, 1998; Brook and Dávila, 2000; Mbiba and Huchzermeyer, 2002).
This chapter reviews some of the recent research on the rural–urban/peri-urban. As outlined in the next section, this work unsettles many of the most comfortable spatializations of development thinking and offers some challenging policy opportunities. But the rural–urban/peri-urban also assert a difficult territoriality.2 ‘Peri-urban’ is represented as a physical space, a concrete locale in which things happen, while the ‘rural–urban’ presents an interactive space (or spaces) of complex fluidity between the urban and rural. Despite the obvious potential, it is notable that very little of the work on the rural–urban/peri-urban takes a multi-spatial approach (Binns and Lynch, 1998). Rather, researchers studying the rural–urban/peri-urban do so from the viewpoint of either the urban or the rural (Mbiba and Huchzermeyer, 2002). In the absence of more multi-spatial approaches, the research on the rural–urban/peri-urban have become extensions of established research agendas and policy formations, rather than institutional spaces that challenge us to bridge the rural–urban divide.3
This argument derives from three personal frustrations that illustrate the need for greater imagination in research and policy. Appropriately, all three are linked in different ways to how we choose to engage with, or ignore, the shift from ‘welfare to market economy’. My first frustration derives from attendance at a workshop to discuss a multi-donor project on rural–urban interaction at which most of the participants defined themselves unambiguously as rural specialists, clearly organized into cohorts of agronomists and environmental scientists, while only a few participants had urban experience and had not been involved in the original research. A major policy proposal tabled at the workshop was for the adoption of ‘urban forestry’ because, according to somebody's key indicators, there seemed to be too few wood products being used in the urban construction sector. It was suggested that the peri-urban area could be used to increase the quantity of urban agro-forestry that might also stabilize slopes, open green space for recreation and prevent land sales. Apparently, cities located in countries with enormous oil, cement and glass industries, closely allied to political elites and undergoing a deepening ‘urbanization of poverty’ should allocate resources to planting trees. I was also unsure how urban forestry was to compete with land markets in which un-serviced plots might be worth up to US$60 per square metre providing some landholders with predictable income from sales, even when conducted illegally. Moreover, experience had shown me that zoning or expropriation for ecological reserves tended to accelerate land sales, provoke tortuous litigation, motivate social movements and encourage environmental damage through leapfrog development (Jones, 1991, 1998). While appearing to promise a dynamic understanding of complex spatial and thematic interactions, an ‘urban problem’ was being seen through the single lens of environmental sustainability. This approach was legitimated by representing the ‘peri-urban’ as a physical space in which the market economy, that presumably had contributed to the ‘urban problem’ in the first place, was conceptually suspended in favour of welfare and environmental arguments.
The second frustration reveals how spatially restricted thinking is likely to be poorly informed about development, generally, and never more so than when land is the focus of debate. In Making Markets Work Better for the Poor, the Department for International Development (DFID, 2000a) attempts to conceptualize how positive welfare outcomes are compatible with the quasi social economics of an asset-vulnerability framework. The document identifies land as an important asset for the poor. But, from thematic and aspatial beginnings, the document proceeds to ignore land and land reform as anything other than rural. The author urges support for the poor to access assets because ‘households with access to land are better able to use their own labour to generate livelihoods through the production of agricultural commodities or through hunting and gathering’ (DFID, 2000a, p18). And which society has recently reached sustainable levels of food production and welfare through individual agrarian autarky? Even households with access to land (and financial, social and human capital) require a multi-spatial response to poverty that generally involves cities. Assets, as defined by the asset vulnerability framework, are not fixed in space; so why think of them as such? Land markets cross our predefined rural and urban categorizations.
The third frustration is the ‘grad-grind’ nature of so much research and policy on land, especially in relation to cities. Despite the opportunities for demanding multidisciplinary and multi-spatial approaches to the study of land, so much research seems to consist of re-branding 20-year-old ideas into something ‘new’ – de Soto (2000) is a prime culprit, but he is not alone. Is the rigidity of our thinking in spatial terms holding back the formation of imaginative research agendas? Is it undermining the effectiveness of policy? More specifically, is it even contributing to the problem of illegality and social exclusion? To what extent are ‘urban problems’ pre-established by policies that affect agrarian or customary land tenure, or programmes of social development in rural areas? Do we know how programmes that affect rural, agrarian and customary land tenure impact upon urban land tenure problems? Why, if we take the concepts of the rural–urban/peri-urban seriously, do we think that an urban problem necessitates an urban solution? How many housing programmes have been designed on the assumption of an increasingly ‘enabling’ policy environment for land, while the architects of rural land reform are designing ways of locking ‘beneficiaries’ into land-holding but out of the land market? In ‘The land market: Where did the synergy go?’ the limitations posed on research and policy by attempting to see land markets with one eye rather than a binocular vision are explored.
RURAL–URBAN: BREAKING DOWN THE BARRIERS OR
RE-IMAGINING POLICY SPACES?
The recent attention to the rural–urban and peri-urban has extended research and policy in some exciting ways. Certainly, we are being alerted to the importance of urban agriculture and rural industrialization that are ‘out of place’ according to traditional categorizations, and to new residential patterns with upper-income groups and some ‘urban’ working class living in meta-suburbs (McGee, 1991; Tacoli, 1998; Kelly, 1999; Ward, 2001). There is also important research revealing how multi-headed and multigenerational households occupy shared geographical spaces as a response to poverty (Tacoli, 1998; Brook and Dávila, 2000; Jerve, 2001). The remittance of income from employment in cities is shown to be a vital component of income stabilization and capital accumulation strategies of ‘part-time peasants’ (Melmed-Sanjak and Lastarria-Cornhiel, 1998; Rigg, 1998). Conversely, maintaining rural links is important to urban survival, not only in gaining access to a more diverse food basket but also through knowledge systems of rural land programmes (Potts and Mutambirwa, 1997; Binns and Lynch, 1998; James, 2001).
Not surprisingly, the concepts of the rural–urban and peri-urban have been picked up as an emerging area for policy. There are rather general references to ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ as interdependent markets linked by exchanges of people, goods, services, capital, social transactions, information and technology, offering new policy spaces. According to the World Bank:
Fostering rural–urban synergies and well-integrated national and city strategies to help countries realize the promise of urbanization represents a prime opportunity for the Bank to pursue a new ‘comprehensive development framework’ (World Bank, 2000, pp3–4).
And DFID entertains the idea that an enterprising city linked to a bucolic countryside can represent a win–win situation in which:
The overall challenge is therefore to ensure that this synergy is realized, that agriculture benefits from, and at the same time helps provide resources for, improved infrastructure, such as roads, electricity, health services and telecommunications; and that agricultural markets meet the food and produce needs of urban centres (DFID, 2000b, p11).
But while stress is now placed on interaction, the policies being advocated are an assortment of conventional fare. As Jerve (2001) notes, most pro-poor and antipoverty initiatives remain steadfast to discreet urban or rural domains. Note, for example, the comforting impression given by DFID that rural and urban might ‘work together’. Dynamic and complex connections across space are replaced by bounded actors with roles to perform in determined spaces: farmers feed cities, and urban residents buy food and make the countryside profitable by raising investment. Policy-makers conveniently ignore the implication that if the rural and urban are not discreet spaces, then it might no longer be appropriate to think of agricultural policies as assisting a ‘rural’ poor (McGee, 1991). There seems to be little imaginative discussion of whether policies can be spatially interactive. How many development agencies are encouraging the rural poor to gain jobs in urban areas, and not just in the nearest city or even within the same nation state? Is the best job for a sharecropper in Uganda to be found in Kampala or in London, where they might have relatives (social capital), receive education for their children (human capital) and retain savings in hard currency (financial capital)? Despite millions of people making this kind of observation each year, I don't know of a multilateral agency programme that encourages this kind of rural–urban interface.4
Indeed, while ‘buzzing’ with the new terms many policy-makers and researchers are actually reasserting a conventional territoriality. The rural–urban, from being a liminal space of flows, is often succeeded by terms such as ‘interaction’, ‘linkage’ or ‘interface’ that suggest a relationship between two fixed spaces. Peri-urban, a term that should be meaningless if we embrace multi-spatiality, has become supplemented by ‘edge’, ‘fringe’ or ‘rim’ that suggest a physical space somehow different from, and probably in transition between, the immutable spaces of rural and urban. This can lead to some confusion, as when the World Bank notes that ‘urban poverty is growing in scale and extent, especially at the peri-urban rim’ (World Bank, 2000, p3). Where is that exactly? Is there a rim around the urban or does the peri-urban have its own rim? Is the peri-urban rim for poverty the same as the peri-urban rim of environmental interaction? Should the peri-urban, defined according to environmental criteria, include all forms of environmental interaction or just those that we do not like, such as wastewater (mis)management or refuse dumping?5 Surely, if we are going to look for ‘synergies’ we must be alive to the construction of territorialities. We must consider, at the very least, institutional spaces, as well as physical ones. An obvious place to start is to consider the land market that is inherently multi-spatial.
THE LAND MARKET: WHERE DID THE SYNERGY GO?
A search of the literature on the rural–urban and peri-urban found very few papers that dealt with the land market at all. Rarely, however, was there the honest admission that:
... little is known about how much land is being converted and for what purposes ... there is no characterization of who is buying the land and for what purposes, whether it is urban dwellers buying land for investment or speculative purposes, farmers from other villages or new industries buying agricultural land for industrial purposes (Brook and Dávila, 2000, p16).
Can we seriously talk about sustainable livelihoods and asset frameworks if we do not investigate land, as perhaps the most valuable asset held by the poor, and which transgresses both urban and rural spaces? Is there a development agency or government currently building capacity among the rural poor on how to sell their land for the highest price, how best to invest the proceeds, and how to sell water, construction and transport services to the occupants of the new settlements? These can be lucrative and sustainable businesses. Or is it easier to retain the tedious spatial stereotype that urban growth takes place at the expense of rural livelihoods?
While we ponder, the market is ‘converting’ about 500,000 hectares of agricultural land to urban use per annum, much of it by means that are extra-legal, and often spatially inefficient and socially inequitable (GTZ, 1998). While most economists make no theoretical distinction between a market for land that will be used for housing or one used for maize, we have become accustomed to the idea of something called an urban land market and a rural/agrarian land market. Clearly, it is useful to understand what is happening in the process whereby land is converted from rural to urban use. In particular, there needs to be more research that looks at how agrarian or customary tenure reform affects alienation processes for urban use, and how changes to urban codes or planning procedures impact upon the market for land in rural areas (Hammer, 1998; Jones and Ward, 1998; McAuslan, 1998; Kelly, 1999; Gough and Yankson, 2000; Jones, 2000). However, we must be alert to the difficulty of associating a type of land market with the space in which the land is located, and of inventing a new space, the peri-urban, fringe or edge land market, as an accommodation.
Field research in Mexico conducted by this author provides a good illustration of this. In 1987, I followed up a casual observation that ‘urban’ plots were being sold over 15 kilometres from the ‘fringe’ of the city of Puebla. Using field visits and government maps, I went on to quantify the amount of land being sold and calculated that the peri-urban area was many times larger than the city itself (Jones, 1991). That observation opened many new avenues of research around the themes of land alienation and access, policy and conflict. At the time, it suited me to spatially determine the land market according to the location of the land being converted as I could trace changes to land ownership through the maps and interviews. If, however, I had ‘followed the money’, I might have learned sooner that some important land deals were taking place in San Antonio, Texas and New York, or, had I ‘followed the politics’, that the legal and political legitimacy for land conversion involved actors in Mexico City. The ‘Puebla’ land market exists in a network of spaces and geographical scales that are not restricted to a contiguous city and countryside.
I want to extend the problem of spatially restricted thinking by considering some of the current debates about land policy reform and, especially, security of tenure. According to McLaughlin and de Soto (1994), 90 per cent of rural and 50 per cent of urban property rights in Latin America are not protected by formal titles. Improving upon this situation is a priority for development agencies who claim that improved security of tenure can assist urban management, the equitable provision of adequate shelter, the development of sustainable human settlements, and the alleviation of poverty. Yet, very few urban land tenure programmes have gone to scale (Durand-Lasserve and Royston, 2002).
Consider the record of Latin America, which has the most advanced policy experience with land tenure security (Ward, 2003). In Chile, a highly technocratic government which prioritized private property rights as part of its development strategy managed to issue over 100,000 land titles in 1980, but was delivering fewer than 10,000 titles per annum by 1989. In Argentina, the Arraigo Programme in Buenos Aires allowed the sale of national lands to occupiers, and with much fanfare three settlements with 25,000 inhabitants received title in 1992; but only 3000 titles were issued between 1996 and 1999 (Clichevsky, 1999). In Brazil, the Pro-Favela Programme of Belo Horizonte delivered 6000 titles from 1983 to the end of 2000, mostly to occupants of public land in a city with 500,000 favelados (squatters) (Fernandes, 2001). In Recife, in 1987, the municipality passed legislation to recognize favela (squatter settlements) as Social Interest Development Zones (Zonas Especiais de Interesse Social, ZEIS), and 27 favela were quickly incorporated within zoning measures (Maia, 1995). But, by the early 1990s, only nine had begun the process of legalization and only one favela had been legalized by 2000 (Fernandes, 2001). Meanwhile, there may be 600 squatter settlements in Recife and even some favela declared a ZEIS have been subject to judicial review and eviction (Maia, 1995; de Souza, 2001).
Some of these programmes, and others like them, are often praised for being ‘good practice’. Is this double-speak to legitimate the lack of delivery? Good practice seems to suggest a judgement based on input (process) rather than output (scale and impacts). If we have misgivings at all, we might look for an explanation in policy processes to discover possible shortcomings in the legal and administrative frameworks, the lack of good governance or technical capacity. Good practices can always be made better. How many studies of security of tenure consider the inadequacies of our spatial understanding of policy and change? Yet, all of the programmes described above share a number of common features. First, they are all retrospective, addressing the problem of tenure insecurity for longstanding settlements (Fernandes, 2001; Ward 2003). Thus, despite rhetoric that security of tenure promotes social inclusion, and despite econometric arguments that they could assist poverty alleviation, these programmes primarily avoid the poorest settlements (Lanjouw and Levy, 1998; de Souza, 2001; see also Durand-Lasserve and Royston, 2002). Most planners oppose extending security, and especially titles, to areas that have low population densities; politicians prefer programmes to respond to demand that might take years to articulate; and managers see more logic in prioritizing the incorporation of consolidated settlements into the fiscal base – all of which work against the newest settlements where the poorest reside.
Second, the programmes hold an implicit assumption that the effects of security are going to manifest within the settlement or house. The very term ‘housing investment’ seems to ignore the possibility that increased investment post security/titling might take place somewhere other than the immediate house. Rather than consider change spatially, programmes and the security-of-tenure debate are more widely legitimated by reference to impacts in situ over time. The standard argument is that security of tenure assists an enterprising poor struggling to invest in property ownership and small firms, using credit, and becoming ‘better citizens’, complying with business laws and taking pride in their community (Ward, 2003). Demonstrating the validity of this argument, however, has been made difficult because of failure to consider impacts in a broader spatial setting. No study has adequately followed those who have left legalized settlements – studies have concentrated on presence not absence, when the latter might be more informative. Nor has much attempt been made to measure whether the legalization of settlements raises the shadow price for land (in expectation that new settlements will soon be legalized), or recorded whether programmes disrupt important social institutions that exist outside settlements.
Third, the programmes assume that the problem of insecure (or illegal) tenure in cities is best resolved by measures within the city. A notable absence from most security-of-tenure programmes is consideration of both rural and urban areas (GTZ, 1998). In Latin America, there are two prominent exceptions that, perhaps not without coincidence, are also the only two programmes to have achieved scale of delivery. The first is Peru, which regularized fewer than 18,000 plots from 1961 to 1980, but may have delivered 300,000 titles from 1981 to 1995, and registered 1.4 million ‘properties’ from 1996 to 2001 (McLaughlin and de Soto, 1994; Riofrio, 1998; Calderón, 2000; Kagawa and Turkstra, 2002).6 The second exception is Mexico, where almost 300,000 titles were delivered between 1974 and 1988, approximately 1.1 million titles from 1989 to 1993 and about 600,000 titles to 2001 (Jones and Varley, 1999).
A number of features mark out the experience of Peru and Mexico; not least among them is that tenure problems have been addressed in relatively new and mostly poor settlements.7 While claiming that cause and effect might be unwise, it is suggestive that the scale and quality of difference between these and the previous examples might be related to the fact that, in Peru and Mexico, programmes have addressed both the rural and urban security problem. This is perhaps most conscious in the case of Peru where, since 1996, about 400,000 titles have been registered for non-urban plots (Calderón, 2000; Kagawa and Turkstra, 2002). In Mexico, the agency responsible for expropriation, compensation and title allocation was part of the agrarian sector as the land sales by ejido ‘agrarian’ communities transgressed agrarian law (Jones and Ward, 1998). This legal and political arrangement necessitated a pact between the ejido and the state, which permitted the negotiation of ejido ‘cooperation’. Interestingly, once a more decentralized approach was adopted, with a greater role for municipalities, and agency responsibility was shifted to the federal department responsible for the urban sector, but still within agrarian law, the performance of delivery declined dramatically (Jones and Ward, 1998; Jones and Varley, 1999).
Even for these two countries, however, and just about everywhere else, we have very little grasp of the impact of security of tenure in cities upon agents providing land for city growth. Will an announcement that occupiers are no longer to be evicted generate distress sales as landowners interpret this as a squatter's charter? Will providing greater security of tenure to holders of land in the imaginary ‘peri-urban’ area provide for orderly urban growth or raise prices beyond the reach of the poor?8 These are simple questions for which we appear to have no answers. Rather, governments and multilateral agencies seem willing to spend billions of dollars on programmes to support security of tenure within cities and outside of cities, but rarely seem to address the connection between the two. Indeed, the vogue terms such as rural–urban interface and synergy seem remarkably absent from documents describing policies for security of tenure. Policy has not considered the connectivity implicit in one land market, but prefers to imagine separate – urban, rural and, now, peri-urban – rather than segmented land markets. Rural areas, of course, possess many of the same problems as described for cities: squatting; contested claims involving customary rights; inappropriate regulation; eviction; inequality (see, especially, Toulmin and Quan, 2000; Zoomers and van der Haar, 2000). How many of these same problems manifest in cities are because they were not resolved prior to conversion? Yet, how many of those interested in security issues in cities have looked at the literature describing the experience of rural programmes?9
BRIDGING THE RURAL–URBAN DIVIDE
Property rights, context and governance
The remainder of this chapter considers what ‘urban’ researchers and policy-makers might learn from work on land in rural areas.10 At the risk of gross generalization, it is notable that leading debates in the rural literature place particular emphasis on markets and property rights, and the relations between the two, regarding welfare conditions as an outcome of these relations. By contrast, much of the early policy debate surrounding the urban started from a position of hoped-for welfare outcomes. Only recently have issues that have long been central to rural research and policy, and which are more closely associated with market and/or institutional economics – such as how to use property rights as collateral, how to activate land markets, and shortcomings of law reform – become popular themes for debate. Wherever possible, this section suggests ways in which researchers and policy-makers, whose principle interest is urban, might think across space rather than within separate imagined spaces.
The urban literature on security of tenure is mostly preoccupied with tenure status and legality, rather than with property rights. By contrast, a Property Reform School perspective underpins the diagnosis of problems and provides a framework to arrive at possible solutions in the rural literature (Platteau, 1996). Theoretically, the Property Reform School suggests that institutions will respond over time to social and economic signals. Specifically, it is argued that non-individual tenure systems are unable to cope with population pressure or land scarcity, causing disputes and insecurity that oblige landholders to shorten time horizons, resort to suboptimal investment and adopt disguised land transfers (Feder and Noronha, 1987). But, as ‘we cannot see, feel, touch, or even measure institutions, they are constructs of the human mind’ (North, 1990, p107). Furthermore, there is an awareness that institutions may not change in predictable, socially positive ways or geographically even ways (Jones, 2002). To support the transformation of property rights it is argued that community organizations and, ultimately, the government need to establish predictable market rules and set out systems to adjudicate disputes (North, 1990; Brandão and Feder, 1996). Nevertheless, there is an undiscussed contradiction that while the evolution of rights is likely to be differentiated, the law and state programmes as the preferred institutions of change are insensitive to the particularities of place (Jones, 2002).
The attention to property rights rather than tenure status has motivated considerable interest in understanding the nature of insecurity. In the urban setting there is a tendency either to read off a predetermined condition from the legal category into which occupiers fall, or assume that because evictions occasionally happen then people must feel insecure. Yet, even in settlements formed by invasion and where evictions do occur many residents report that the chance of being evicted is ‘impossible’ (Lanjouw and Levy, 1998). The greater focus of primary research in rural areas has built up considerable evidence that insecurity is linked to a host of demands from family members, other households, the decisions of local leaders, encroachment from neighbouring communities or the state autocracy (Platteau, 1996; Jansen and Roquas, 1998; Firmin-Sellers and Sellers, 1999). Yet, research also shows that the demand for designated ways of attaining more secure rights is contextual and that even where high insecurity is reported, few might make the effort to register land rights or to convert registered land to freehold (Dujon, 1997; Liu et al, 1998; Firmin-Sellers and Sellers, 1999).
As with much of the more rhetorical policy literature for cities, in the rural literature a link has been made between securing property rights and particular structures of governance. This literature has generally stressed the need for administrative decentralization (McLaughlin and de Soto, 1994), attention to greater transparency and closer stakeholder provision of information (Feder and Nishio, 1999), a well-functioning legal system based on consensus (McAuslan, 1998; de Soto, 2000), and a technically competent, well-financed and committed bureaucracy (Wachter and English, 1992). Before reading across from the rural literature, however, it should be noted that the empirical validity of these broad conditions is not clearly specified.11 Indeed, although such conditions are represented as prerequisites, a number of writers note their absence before, during and after attempts to improve property rights (Wachter and English, 1992; Fitzpatrick, 2000; McAuslan, 2003). The lessons that may be drawn from this are that a more critical consideration needs to be given in both the rural and urban to the belief that complex agendas for reforming property rights can be pasted onto the operation of states in ways that conform to good governance. Much more work needs to be done on the human agency of programmes, how information/knowledge networks are created, what political forces form and maintain land structures, and the discourses that dictate certain policy directions. We need to consider whether the good governance that works for the conduct of land (law) reform and land titling in rural areas also works for land subject to conversion to urban use.
Property rights, ‘alternative’ tenure systems and land ‘law’
reform
In the literature on urban land tenure, the pervasiveness of the freehold titling discourse means that one can label just about anything that is not an individually held, formally recognized, freehold title as ‘alternative’. Such a conformity–alternative binary is appreciated as problematic in the rural-based literature. First, there is a nuance to the idea that customary practices are separate from formal codes, and therefore can be formalized, because what we understand as custom was constructed by formal law and state agency during the past (Prill-Brett, 1997; Tshuma, 1998; Toulmin and Quan, 2000). Second, for many years the supposed champion of the titling discourse, the World Bank, has recognized efficiency arguments for not pursuing individual titles (Deininger and Binswanger, 1998). Picking up on work in Africa, especially, the World Bank has accepted the case for adaptive rather than replacement systems of tenure as reflections of less concrete bundles of rights (Platteau, 1996; Toulmin and Quan, 2000). From an adaptive perspective, there is now a large literature showing that where insecurity can be dealt with locally and land sales to outsiders are not a priority, then group titles or trust arrangements can work well (Atwood, 1990; Bassett and Jacobs, 1997; Fitzpatrick, 2000; Fourie, 2003).
Third, there has been considerable attention to the costs as well as the benefits of non-freehold systems, and care not to confuse an ‘alternative’ with presumed positive social outcomes (Deininger and Feder, 1998; Toulmin and Quan, 2000). Research has critiqued the efficiency and efficacy of community-based trust or co-title arrangements (Bassett and Jacobs, 1997; Deere and León, 2000; Fourie, 2003). This work shows that secure property rights, based on communal or customary type systems, are not necessarily more egalitarian as ‘custom’ is constructed by power relations that involve asymmetric information (Moore, 1998; Tshuma, 1998) and considerable state oversight or collusion (Feder and Noronha, 1987; Hammer, 1998). In systems where security is acquired through investment, the better-off can invest more to secure those rights, oblige poorer households to invest beyond what is rational for their income, and take over properties that appear to have been abandoned (Gray and Kevane, 2001). Where security is attained through fulfilling social obligations, these might be cheap in financial terms, but impose high opportunity costs and work against the aims of gender, age or ethnic equality (Moore, 1998; James, 2001). Unlike titled systems where enforcement of rights should be through state-sanctioned administrative or juridical procedures, the enforcement of ‘alternative’ socially legitimated property rights may rely upon those with a vested interest in the outcome, are not accountable for decisions and who might prefer temporary resolutions (Lemel, 1988; Deininger and Feder, 1998).
There are at least two implications for urban learning from these debates – especially in the context of a general shift from welfare to market economy. First, rather than a preoccupation with tenure systems, property rights affords a more prominent consideration of institutions. Property rights are complex bundles involving a range of interlocking institutions and organizations. There is not a single right that is unrelated to and unaffected by others, hence the definition of property rights in some quarters as an expression of exclusion. Therefore, property rights (and titles as just one simplified version of rights) are reflections of social relations. It is theoretically misleading, therefore, to talk about a spectrum of tenure along which there is, at some point, an ‘adequate’ level of security. Since property rights are not one dimensional, governments cannot follow a set menu of actions to attain a particular level of security. What is perceived to be adequate by a landholder will not correspond to the perception of a prospective developer, an informal creditor, an heir, and so on.
The second implication is for critical attention to the law as the institutional instrument most closely linked to reform. Recent experiences show how difficult it has been to translate apparently acceptable rights-based agendas into laws and then into practice (McAuslan, 2003). The difficulties of land reform based on a legal positivism for countries that are characterized as lacking the ‘rule of law’ and where state intervention is regarded as a threat to property rights needs wider discussion. Writers on the urban similarly need to question their implicit faith in the role of law before assuming that the rule of law can somehow be constructed to secure property rights (Jones, 2002).12 In the urban context especially, we need primary research, not inductive guesswork, on the perception of law by those who undertake and sanction illegal land activities. We must avoid what we have at present, which is a notional concept of ‘rule of law’ as understood by law-makers or related stakeholders. If we understand insecurity as embedded within an array of institutions that legitimate occupation, then it might be helpful to also understand the law from this, more plural, perspective.
Land titles and investment
In the rural-based literature there are prominent arguments that secure property rights and titling, in particular, deliver efficiency benefits by raising productivity levels, access to credit, prevention of asset division, secure contracts and less state interference, and that these, in turn, might provide equity benefits and possibly poverty reduction (Deininger and Binswanger, 1998; Melmed-Sanjak and Lastarria-Cornhiel, 1998; Deininger, 1999). Most of these arguments can be supported by static econometric models which show the importance of tying reforms to the operation of other factor markets (Atwood, 1990; Besley, 1995; Carter and Salgado, 1998; Deininger and Feder, 1998). By contrast, despite some early work from the World Bank (Jimenez, 1984),13 the link between tenure (property rights) and investment tends to be supported by reference to household behaviour.14
The argument that more secure property rights will raise productivity because of reduced uncertainty motivating farmers to invest scarce resources, adopt technology and plant higher value/yield crops is supported by data from titling programmes in Honduras, Paraguay, China and elsewhere (Deininger and Feder, 1998; Liu et al, 1998; Carter and Olinto, 2003). Although many rural titling programmes impose restrictions on holders from selling or ceding land, in similar ways to the restrictive property right-giving of many urban programmes, researchers have tended to identify the need to coordinate rights/titles with the need for active land markets. Besley (1995) argues from a study in Ghana that the rights–investment relationship requires a land market to assure the holder of ‘gains from trade’. A number of researchers note that investment does not require formal titles so long as customs and norms regulate land rights and reduce uncertainty adequately. But where land is under pressure from commercialization and transactions by outsiders, the credibility of whom cannot be vouched for by social agency and who themselves require evidence of seller rights, formal land title becomes a necessity.
Yet, others have questioned the neat tenure security investment (Melmed-Sanjak and Lastarria-Cornhiel, 1998), even casting doubt that the means to secure property rights are not cost effective (Atwood, 1990; Pinckney and Kimuyu, 1994; Place and Migot-Adholla, 1998). Lemel (1988) cites a number of studies to point out that where title and investment are both correlated to farm size (wealth), soil quality and age of holder, a simple connection may be difficult to prove. Pinckney and Kimuyu (1994) show from a comparison of titled land in Kenya and non-titled land in Tanzania that investment levels are not changed by titles either comparatively or over time. Atwood (1990) and Place and Migot-Adholla (1998) also question whether the impact of titling is positive for either productivity or equity, and present evidence that registration and title are not significantly related to yields. As Gray and Kevane (2001) show in a study that analyses reverse causation, insecurity does not lead to poor practices (such as environmental degradation and low yields), but may encourage intensive investment and use. Atwood (1990) concludes that the impact of title or registration cannot be predicted deductively; rather, one has to understand the causes and differential effects on people and investment of insecurity. Feder and Nishio (1999) argue, however, that we still need more robust assessment of the costs and benefits of measures to provide security. As already indicated, urban research has floundered on building methodologically tight assessments. We could learn from the rural.
Economic behaviour and collateralized borrowing
According to the win–win scenario, security of tenure and, especially, titles give financial institutions a greater guarantee of collateral upon which to lend and the occupiers a valorized property upon which to borrow. Indeed, data indicate that following land titling in Costa Rica, Honduras, Jamaica, Paraguay and Thailand, access to credit did increase significantly (Feder and Noronha, 1987; Feder and Nishio, 1999). Other research broadly supports the win–win scenario but notes that behaviour and outcome will be differentiated according to existing asset holding, savings and additional incomes (GTZ, 1998; Deininger and Olinto, 2000). The strong correlation between existing wealth and the take-up of reform opportunities means that access to credit might further support a tilt to better-off groups (Carter and Salgado, 1998; Melmed-Sanjak and Lastarria-Cornhiel, 1998). This might be especially so where households are already in debt to formal or informal creditors, so that the take-up of additional credit upon acquiring a title is unlikely to be pronounced in a safety-first environment (Carter, 2000).
Some writers go so far as to doubt the robustness of an empirical link to credit. Lemel (1988) points to a number of methodological problems with studies, such as not accounting for the influence of other assets, ownership changes over time and the use of non-comparable control groups. Studies of Cameroon, Honduras and Kenya found that few producers received credit, and land titles were not an important source of collateral (Pinckney and Kimuyu, 1994; Jansen and Roquas, 1998; Place and Migot-Adholla, 1998; Firmin-Sellers and Sellers, 1999). In Guatemala, Nicaragua and Mexico, credit was denied to small-scale farmers even when legal land title was available due, in part, to adjustment reforms of the financial sector and the availability of less risky lending alternatives (Jonakin, 1997; Carter, 2000; Jones, 2000). Various studies suggest that the security-to-credit relationship is strongest where dedicated financial institutions are established as part of integrated development programmes (Alston et al, 1996; Deininger, 1999).
Researchers of rural land reform have also raised conceptual reasons to doubt the simplicity of a security-to-credit link (Atwood, 1990; Platteau, 2000). First, most formal credit markets are highly regulated and have few incentives to go downmarket. It is not impossible to imagine a short-run scenario in which the availability of credit to plot-holders falls because banks do not move in and informal lenders move out. Second, titles do not reduce the transaction costs incurred by banks of dealing with many, highly dispersed, low collateral and insecurely employed potential borrowers (Deininger and Binswanger, 1998) – hence the numerous micro-finance initiatives sponsored by agencies presenting access to credit as otherwise a natural outcome of various policy measures, including more secure property rights. Third, collateral requires an active land market with no barriers to foreclosure and resale, whereas, in practice, even after titling, there are numerous legal and customary limits on foreclosure. Fourth, formal credit will not be forthcoming where informal credit institutions are strong, offering credit at high rates of interest and with considerable social pressure (Feder and Noronha, 1987), or where local endogenous factors are influential (Besley, 1995; Gray and Kevane, 2001). Fifth, we have probably over-represented the quality of titles and other documents as a summary of property rights information and, therefore, as a basis for assessing risk. Documents do not track claims by relatives, moneylenders or government agencies, while fraud and conveyancing shortcomings undermine their validity (Lemel, 1988).
These insights are useful to add to the very limited research on security and finance in cities, which has failed to look at the demand for credit (Lanjouw and Levy, 1998) or how households managed to acquire plots and consolidate housing so quickly in an apparently ‘under’ credit-served context. In the light of the research on rural security, titling and credit, there should be very little surprise that recent data from Peru show that the massive registration programme there has not linked secure property rights to credit. One survey found that only 15 in 425 households regularized between 1996–1999 had gained access to credit, and this was through a government loan programme that makes no distinction on legality (Kagawa and Turkstra, 2002). Another survey found that the purpose of acquiring ‘housing loans’ was not for housing, but almost exclusively for micro-enterprises (Riofrio, 1998). Housing was the guarantee, not the destination, of funds as bank lending rates at 40 per cent repayable over a maximum of 18 months could never be met if money was spent on housing alone. As Riofrio (1998) found, the few borrowers tended not to be the most socially excluded but had more wage earners and a small business.
Property rights, land markets and prices
Security of land tenure in cities has been justified for the benefits that it will bring to those in situ. Many policy-makers, and not just a few researchers, while in favour of legalization and secure tenure, are suspicious of boosting land markets that they regard as the cause of the ‘urban problem’. In numerous upgrading programmes, security has been argued on welfare grounds, legitimating the imposition of constraints on selling land and housing on the market. As de Soto (2000) has pointed out, this curtailing of property rights may make policy-makers complicit in a bias against the poor, who having invested in property then find great difficulty in realizing that asset which de Soto claims might be worth US$9.3 trillion.
This welfare over market is somewhat in contrast to many rural land titling programmes that actually have as their aim to activate the land market by encouraging more efficient landholders to buy out less efficient ones (Brandão and Feder, 1996; Deininger and Binswanger, 1998; Carter, 2000). In the case of the ‘negotiated land reform’ adopted in South Africa, Brazil, Guatemala and India, a land market is stimulated by capital grants, state brokerage to locate willing sellers and fiscal policies, all of which are supposed to encourage markets to distribute land with secure property rights to smaller-scale holders (Deininger, 1999). Generally, researchers have argued that linking property rights, for example as titles, to an active land market is likely to be pro-poor. Land titles might reduce transaction costs, which are judged to be higher in informal and customary-based markets, by making exchanges more certain and thereby benefiting both buyer and seller (North 1990; Carter and Salgado, 1998). Lower transaction costs should be reflected in lower prices, although it is recognized that as security will allow realization of the present value of the income stream (which will increase through investment), land prices could rise (Brandão and Feder, 1996; Carter and Salgado, 1998).
Empirical support for these arguments seems mixed. In Thailand, where land titling increased access to credit, and raised investment and income to titled farmers compared to untitled, it was also found that land transactions were stimulated and that the price of titled land was greater than untitled (Feder and Nishio, 1999). In Brazil, Alston et al (1996) found that titles increased the opportunities for land transactions and also raised land value. The empirical model suggested that values rose because of increased demand for titled land as a result of reduced enforcement costs and investment; but it presented no data that transactions were prevalent or had increased. It has also been suggested that the volume of transactions might be inflated by title recipients selling up after a programme in order to release capital for other purposes (Jonakin, 1997). Dissent on the activation of land markets comes from a study of Kenya showing that land titles did not motivate more transactions compared to the pre-existing land market (Pinckney and Kimuyu, 1994; Place and Migot-Adholla, 1998), and in Honduras and Paraguay, where differences in land market activity between titled and non-titled plots proved difficult to identify (Carter and Salgado, 1998). Finally, Platteau's (2000) excellent review of the African experience reveals that titles did not activate the land market; but where the market was already active, the superimposition of titles may have had profound social impacts through concentration, asymmetric information and access to institutions.
The deliberate link in ‘rural’ titling programmes to land market transactions should interest urban policy-makers and researchers. It is worth exploring whether, compared to the dismal performance of retrospective legalization programmes, a form of negotiated land reform could operate in or near cities. First, negotiated land reform operates on the basis of income and not settlement location and, therefore, has a potential to target the poor. Second, it might encourage manageable urban growth by facilitating the purchase of plots in existing settlements. Third, the demand for formal plots part-financed with a grant and fast transaction periods should encourage developers to increase supply. Fourth, the programme could be pro-cyclical to expand during declines in ‘real’ land prices.15 Fifth, the subsidy is transparent, non-recurrent and can be recovered through fiscal measures.
Property rights and social inclusion
While securing property rights is often represented as part of a ‘social contract’, with connotations of being inclusive and communal, they are also about how we recognize the exclusion of others. Nevertheless, there are a number of arguments in favour of secure property rights as part of broader social and poverty programmes. De Soto (2000) has argued that titling releases the assets of the poor, thereby creating opportunities for leading them out of poverty. Deininger (1999) argues that market-assisted land reform can assist the very poor by assuring individually recognized rights within a collective framework. Feder and Noronha (1987) propose that as titles provide all landholders with the same rights, they constrain those with better information from buying out those who lack information and, in particular, diminish the exploitative power of chiefs and other leaders. Nevertheless, as Carter (2000) notes, while many programmes are legitimated by reference to poverty alleviation and social inclusion, very few have been designed with this aim or can demonstrate a positive influence.
Research on rural areas has highlighted how making statements about the affect on social inclusion needs to acknowledge two conceptual difficulties. First, securing property rights usually entails making a snapshot of the status quo, which may or may not be socially equitable and which may have resulted from pressure upon the vulnerable in the expectation of reward with security (title) (Lemel, 1988; Toulmin and Quan, 2000). Second, it is difficult to disentangle whether it is the security/title itself that causes social inclusion/exclusion or the manner of conferment. Feder and Nishio (1999, p38), for example, argue that the negative implications of titling are likely to be worse when implementation is ‘sporadic’. This focuses attention on the capacity of outreach workers to explain rules and procedures, but should not obscure the possibility that this impact might also be due to resistance from groups who believe themselves to be vulnerable to change (Jones, 2000).
These conceptual difficulties notwithstanding, studies have indicated how measures to confer security of property rights have worked against social inclusion. According to Dujon (1997), Jansen and Roquas (1998) and Platteau (1996), more secure property rights and, especially, titles may be incompatible with established institutions. In particular, it has been noted how safety mechanisms to protect vulnerable groups, such as access to common resources, may be eroded with titling and pro-individual based property rights (Atwood, 1990; Jacobs, 1998). Land concentration may increase in the hands of community leaders and men, generally (Lastarria-Cornheil, 1997; Jansen and Roquas, 1998; Izumi, 1999; James, 2001), even when reform was predicated upon recognizing the equal rights of women (Firmin-Sellers and Sellers, 1999; Deere and León, 2000). Titling or other procedures may require contact with a single household ‘head’; may expressly deny the possibility of joint or multiple plot holding; or may encourage self-selection through the impression that obtaining credit is less likely for women or groups perceived as less productive, where there is a preference for male heirs or where agencies are under pressure to distribute documents to an ambitious schedule (Lastarria-Cornheil, 1997; Meinzin-Dick et al, 1997; Hammer, 1998; Jacobs, 1998).
The broad implication is that existing social institutions will not be extinguished with changes to tenure status or property rights (Platteau, 1996) and therefore the representation in much of the literature that secure rights will solve a series of social problems is by no means automatic. Indeed, the idea that security is constantly contested is shown by the stress placed upon mechanisms to resolve disputes as part of many reforms (Deininger and Feder, 1998; GTZ, 1998; Jones, 2000; Platteau, 2000). There is considerable appreciation that reforms induce certain kinds of disputes, possibly resulting in removals, incursions and illegal land sales (Prill-Brett, 1997; Jansen and Roquas, 1998; Place and Migot-Adholla, 1998; Fitzpatrick, 2000; McAuslan, 2003). Disputes will emerge when titles are ‘botched’ or overzealously issued without accurate information, as has happened in many countries (Jones and Varley, 1999; Platteau, 2000), or involves state intrusion into the administration of domestic life (such as inheritance and intra-household negotiations on gender) (Jansen and Roquas, 1998; Jones, 2000). Again, what matters is not choosing the adequate level of tenure security to place on offer, but the legitimacy of the institutions and consensus about how property rights are formed and maintained.
CONCLUSIONS
This chapter has argued that we should get away from the spatial conformity of so much research and policy. Illustration of this argument is, of course, based on a deceit as – through most of the chapter – a distinction has been made between writing on the urban and the rural. Largely, the chapter has been forced into this deceit as writers have generally looked at either the rural or the urban, and rarely considered connectivity. The most notable exception in recent times has been the attention to the rural–urban or peri-urban. It is empirically interesting to consider that spatial boundaries between the rural and urban are becoming so blurred that ‘distinctions among cities, towns and rural areas are becoming almost obsolete as economic activity spreads outward into vast semi-urbanized and rural industrialized regions’ (World Bank, 2000, p90). But much of this literature has not shown itself to be alert to the implications of territoriality; inventing new spatial terms for imaginary spaces is not an innocent act. Just as the failure to think spatially might have contributed to the rather limited progress in certain policy areas, such as the provision of security of tenure in cities, it is equally disingenuous to ‘locate’ a new set of problems within an imagined space called the peri-urban and then diagnose that the solutions should also be located there.
In predominantly market economies in which policy is increasingly legitimated according to how it enables the market to work, a more conceptual and multi-spatial understanding is required. This chapter suggests that if we are to take the ‘blurring’ seriously, we should become rural–urban researchers and think of policy design in these terms. A useful step is for urban researchers to learn more about the rural and, although space has not permitted demonstration, vice versa. Until we are able to grasp the conceptual and empirical linkages across the rural and urban, it seems premature to talk about policy synergy. One approach might be to focus on institutions that connect spaces in order to cross the rural–urban divide. The most obvious institutions to consider are probably land markets and law, both of which seem largely absent from analysis in the peri-urban and rural–urban literatures; but we should also consider political agency, power and custom.
If we want to plan, manage or govern urban growth, then we need to know about how the land market is operating outside of cities. If landholders are reluctant to make improvements in the face of pending urbanization, what influence will this have on the land price-conversion ratio? Do titles make any difference in such circumstances? If greater security provides for more active land markets, will this contribute to more- or less-ordered growth? If security raises prices as valorized investment exceeds the reduction in transaction costs, will this make it harder to assemble sufficient quantities of land for developments suitable for lower-income groups? Might land titling for the security of ‘farmers’ have negative implications for the urban poor's access to land? Or might a rural titling programme that creates fewer, better-off landholders and/or undermines customary laws be seen as beneficial by a manager attempting to ‘order’ urban growth? Can one devise a land law that deals appropriately and consensually with the needs of the rural and the urban? Until we know how institutions connect through space, we are deluding ourselves that synergy can be constructed.
NOTES
1 I would like to thank Edesio Fernandes for his helpful comments on the draft version of this chapter.
2 Territoriality is the attempt to influence people by delimiting and asserting control over a geographic area.
3 By pointing to the need for a bridge across the rural–urban divide, therefore, I am not repeating the call for regional policy or metropolitan governance, which again created discreet, but imaginary (political) spaces.
4 One might argue that immigration amnesty programmes are a post-hoc response to the multi-spatial strategies of the poor. At a more localized level, Edesio Fernandes (2001) suggested that the ‘rurban’ programme in Parana, Brazil, was based, in principle, on a multi-spatial approach; but I could not find details in time to back this up.
5 Where peri-urban is used to capture a space for debating environmental sustainability, it tends to ignore air pollution completely.
6 The government also lowered the standards for a property to qualify for registration, making comparison over time not strictly appropriate.
7 This is not to deny a high degree of selectivity. In Peru, delivery has been high partly because Comisión de Formalización de la Propiedad Informal (COFOPRI) has concentrated upon state-owned and most flat desert land, rather than upon land with complicated legal and political conditions. In Mexico, insecurity of holding on private land has been poorly dealt with by a range of decentralized state-level agencies.
8 Based on the notion of change in situ, discussion of urban security of tenure often makes incidental reference to the possibility that land prices may decline as transaction costs are assumed to fall with the removal of restrictive social institutions and regulations. Separately, however, the same voices can be heard claiming that security of tenure is good for the poor as it allows them to realize an increasingly valuable asset, implying, therefore, that prices rise as utility is valorized.
9 Land titling programmes for rural areas can be large. In Thailand, 5.5 million titles have been distributed at a cost of US$247 million between 1984 and 1997; in Mexico, a titling programme begun in 1993 had distributed certificates to 2.2 million households at a cost of US$1.1 billion by 2000; and in the Honduras 125,000 titles were distributed from the mid 1970s to the early 1990s (Jansen and Roquas, 1998; Jones, 2000).
10 I am conscious that this review misses numerous important topics and authors. Taxation on agriculture, for example, may accelerate the conversion of land to urban use, as will the availability of subsidized credit for housing, while the dedication of credit to agriculture may slow conversion but raise land prices, making it more costly to establish settlements for low-income groups.
11 The argument for decentralization is hardly born out by the case of Peru, upon which it is often justified. Both the property formalization system (PROFORM) and COFOPRI ran from the Office of the President in order to sort out administrative conflicts, and decentralization really only took shape from 2001. Moreover, the technical experience of Peru and Mexico is that scale may need some centralization in order to coordinate relevant national legislation, control groups involved in illegal land development and challenge the protection of politicians over whom local government will have little leverage.
12 Readers are referred to the International Research Group on Law and Urban Space at www.irglus.org.
13 It is interesting that the econometric model proposed by Jimenez is based on ‘a city of a fixed size in which there is an amount of land (which is also fixed in size) that is available for squatting’ (Jimenez, 1984, p557). In other words, the model assumes no land market and spatial mobility in order to analyse a set of problems related to highly active land markets and high levels of spatial mobility.
14 In fact, there is not much theoretical or empirical consideration of actual household behaviour in either the urban or rural literatures (Melmed-Sanjak and Lastarria-Cornhiel, 1998).
15 Of course, some adaptation might be necessary as negotiated reform in South Africa was possible because the enormous release of land supply post-apartheid forced land prices downward. This would not be likely in areas subject to urban growth.
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